Wednesday, January 30, 2013

A juxtaposition of three stories tells a lot about the state of our nation. Our economy is fragile. Our GDP declined in the 4th Quarter and our economy is facing yet more headwinds in the future. The sector hurt the worst by Obama are his most loyal constituents - blacks. And lastly, is California a cautionary tale for the rest of the U.S., or is it a blueprint for our future.

Our nation's economy actually contracted .1% during the fourth quarter of last year according to the preliminary report issued by the Commerce Dept. Hot Air does a good analysis of the numbers. This may well be anomalous, associated with a quarterly drop in government spending and the reduction in inventories, but it still shows just how fragile our economy is going into Obama's second term. Tthat despite four years of massively increased government spending and historically low interest rates. And on the horizon are tax increases already passed that will punish the job creators and hurt capital formation. There are all the taxes and expenses associated with Obamacare that will begin kicking in as 2014 approaches. And then of course there is the tsunami of new regulations expected in Obama's second term. A portion of that tsunami will be new EPA regulations further expanding Obama's war on energy sector, something Obama all but promised during his second inaugural speech. The best case scenario is four years of very sluggish growth and little if any job creation.

The second story, via Gateway Pundit, is NAACP President Ben Jealous who, while appearing on Meet The Press last Sunday, made the admission that blacks are doing "far worse" under Obama. This should come as a surprise to no one. Blacks are loyal to Obama and the left, but that loyalty is a one way street. Blacks identify with Obama as black. The true irony is that they don't realize that his skin color is, well, only skin deep. It is meaningless to his identity as a highly ideological leftist. And with that as his motivating force, blacks run a distant second to moneyed interests - i.e, public sector unions - and pathways to greater power - i.e., the green agenda.

Lastly, there is a wholly depressing column from V.D. Hanson at PJM, wherein he gives a eulogy for his state, California, a state sinking under decades of left wing political experimentation that are driving out the productive middle class in droves. In assessing the cause, he writes:

California has changed not due to race but due to culture, most prominently because the recent generation of immigrants from Latin America did not — as in the past, for the most part — come legally in manageable numbers and integrate under the host’s assimilationist paradigm. Instead, in the last three decades huge arrivals of illegal aliens from Mexico and Latin America saw Democrats as the party of multiculturalism, separatism, entitlements, open borders, non-enforcement of immigration laws, and eventually plentiful state employment.

Given the numbers, the multicultural paradigm of the salad bowl that focused on “diversity” rather than unity, and the massive new government assistance, how could the old American tonic of assimilation, intermarriage, and integration keep up with the new influxes? It could not.

These three stories demonstrate the insanity that is America's politics today. Obama proved in his first four years that he wasn't qualified to run a lemonade stand, yet he gets reelected. Over 90% of blacks, the people who have as a group suffered the most under Obama, nonetheless pull the lever for him. The left wins the Hispanic vote by campaigning against the values and economics that made our country great. It is a devil's pact destined by simple math to end very badly. And yet, the left is the dominant force in politics today.

Just as V. D. Hanson sees the future as exceedingly bleak for his state, I see the future exceedingly bleak for our nation. I cannot see our economy recovering. And until Conservatives are able to break the left's stranglehold on black and Hispanic voters, there is simply no way we are going to win a large enough majority to change our nation's economic and cultural trajectory. Given objective reality, we should be able to do this on the basis of conservative principles, but I don't see anyone on the right making a serious attempt to do so. It is both tragedy and travesty.